Polyglot Rails applications with Rubinius

Many of us write, maintain and scale Rails applications for a living. And
we enjoy it because we love Ruby. As developers, we love its expressiveness,
conciseness, and the freedom and happiness it gives us. But at the same time,
Rubyists are often attracted to other programming languages and willing to
learn them: Ruby programmers are often eager polyglots.

According to the Sapir-Whorf theorem, our thoughts are constrained by our
language: we think in terms of language. And the more languages we speak,
and the richer those are, the broader our mental universe becomes.
In the same way, different programming languages enable us to think
differently about technical problems.

What if we could write Rails applications using multiple programming
languages? Can you imagine different programming paradigms all running
together in the same application? Passing Ruby, Clojure, Python
objects back and forth, interacting with each other, within the same VM?

Fortunately Rubinius, a high-end Ruby implementation, empowers us with
this possibility. In this talk I'll share my experience with this
approach and explain a bit about the technical foundations implied.